A young, idealistic, beautiful female employee has been taking part in a public demonstration against the tyrant. She arrives at her place of work breathless and afraid. Come evening, her employer offers to drive her home with the undoubted aim of becoming her lover, because in the tension of recent weeks they have become irresistible to each other. The dream of a better Panama is like the dream of a shared life together, and even Marta agrees that only the Yanquis can cure the mess the Yanquis have created, and that the Yanquis must act soon. On the way, they are stopped at a roadblock by Dingbats who wish to know why Marta is wearing a white shirt, which is the symbol of resistance to Noriega. Receiving no satisfactory explanation, they obliterate her face. Pendel lays the freely-bleeding Marta in the back of his car and drives in blind panic and at breakneck speed to the university – Mickie is a student too in those days – and by a miracle finds him in the library, and Mickie is the only person Pendel can think of who is safe. Mickie knows a doctor, calls him, threatens, bribes him. Mickie drives Pendel’s four-track, Pendel sits in the back with Marta’s head bleeding all over his lap, soaking his trousers and messing up the family upholstery for ever. The doctor does his worst, Pendel informs Marta’s parents, gives money, showers and changes clothes at the shop, goes home by cab to Louisa and for three days is prevented by guilt and fear from telling her what has happened, preferring to regale her instead with a cock-and-bull story about some idiot driving into the side of the four-track, total write-off, Lou, have to get a whole new one, I’ve spoken to the insurance boys, doesn’t seem to be a problem. Not till day five does he find the courage to explain deprecatingly that Marta got herself mixed up in a student riot, Lou, facial injuries, long recuperation necessary, I’ve promised to take her back when she’s recovered.
‘Oh,’ says Louisa.
‘And Mickie’s gone to prison,’ he goes on inconsequentially, omitting to add that the craven doctor has informed on him, and would have informed on Pendel also, if he had only known his name.
‘Oh,’ says Louisa a second time.
‘Reason only functions when the emotions are involved,’ Marta announced, holding Pendel’s fingers to her lips and kissing each in turn.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I read it. You seem to be puzzling about something. I thought it might be useful.’
‘Reason is supposed to be logical,’ he objected.
‘There’s no logic unless the emotions are involved. You want to do something, so you do it. That’s logical. You want to do something and don’t do it, that’s a breakdown of reason.’
‘I suppose that’s true then, isn’t it?’ said Pendel, who distrusted all abstracts except his own. ‘I must say, those books do give you the lingo, then, don’t they? Proper little professor you sound like, and you haven’t even taken your exams.’
She never pressed him, which was why he was not afraid to come to her. She seemed to know that he never spoke the truth to anyone, that he kept it all inside himself for politeness. The little he told her was therefore precious to them both.
‘How’s Osnard?’ she asked.
‘How should he be?’
‘Why does he think he owns you?’
‘He knows things,’ Pendel replied.
‘Things about you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do I know them?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are they bad things?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll help you, whatever it is. You want me to kill him, I’ll kill him and go to jail.’
‘For the other Panama?’
‘For you.’
Ramón Rudd had shares in a casino in the Old City and liked to go there to relax. They perched on a plush bench looking down on bare-shouldered women and puffy-eyed croupiers seated at empty roulette tables.
‘I’m going to pay off the debt, Ramón,’ Pendel told him. ‘The principal, the interest, the lot. I’m going to wipe the slate clean.’
‘What with?’
‘Let’s say I’ve met a mad millionaire.’
Ramón sucked some lemon juice through a straw.